The Latest on Legal Research

BankruptcyData.com has added The United States Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware to its free daily listings of business bankruptcy filings. The web site now lists reports from over 65 districts and is updated daily. Other newly added districts include New Jersey, Northern District of Illinois, and Rhode Island. The current listings contain over 400 companies in a trailing 30-day format. Users can access the date a company has filed for bankruptcy, where, when, and the attorney contact information for free. You can check out their press release at: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010103/ma_bankrup.html .

The guide is browsable by alphabet. Links are at the top of the page linked above. Acronyms are listed in their abbreviated form and defined as the complete term and related terms are cross-referenced to give a clearer meaning. Additionally, there is a direct link to the Society’s Public Relations Department for those who cannot find a definition.

This site desperately needs a search engine, and since individual words are not linked, references aren’t cross linked. That’s unfortunate, because there’s a lot of information here.

Lexis-Nexis Acquires Book Publishing Company

Lexis-Nexis’s acquisition of the Book Publishing Company will allow Lexis-Nexis to expand their municipal code offerings to legal professionals. BPC is the “second largest publisher of municipal codes and is the only codification company to develop and support industry software,” according to the press release. They have published codified ordinances for more than 2,000 municipalities and currently have contracts with about 1,200 municipalities to publish their ordinances. You can get the press release at http://library.northernlight.com/FB20010105760000091.html .

Some fun highlights: the current population is 281,421,906 (an increase of over 13% since the last census). California is the most populated state in the US. The least populated is — Alaska?? Nope. Wyoming. The site includes information on the sizes of states (population for the 2000 census, the 1990 census, and the rankings for both this and the last census). Information is available in a variety of formats, including ASCII, Excel files, and PDF. Information on changes in congressional appointments are also available here. More information from the census will be released in March and continue to be released through 2003.

Search Engine for Intellectual Property Information

Intellectual property is a big deal nowadays, so it’s not too surprising that there’s now a search engine devoted to it. (Actually, it’s more appropriately a gateway to search engines.)

IPSearchEngine ( http://www.IPSearchEngine.com ) starts off with a several screen demo. The demo doesn’t drop you into the actual search engine, as you might think. Instead, you have to use the icons along the top of the screen to get into the demo. There are two sets of icons. The first set of icons are for patent prior art databases, non-patent prior art databases, request for legal fee bids (or registration in the case of attorneys), general PatentCafe resources, and registered IP attorneys and counselors. The second set of icons contains things like how to put the search engine on your own site and how to add a database to the engine.

Now, before you get to search through any of this IP goodness you’ll have to register. Information required includes name, state, country, valid e-mail, number of researchers at your company, “You Are” (I wasn’t any of the ones it listed and it didn’t have an other), primary use, user name, and password. Each section has a listing of several external search engines on the left side of the screen — the patent prior art database has a listing for the USPTO, an India patents database, etc. The search form is on the IPSearchEngine page, but the results will pop-up in an external window. (I could not get this to work with the latest version of Mozilla. It works fine with Netscape 4.7, though.)

I can’t say that any of the databases listed in this search engine were a big surprise to me, but IP continues to be a hot issue and I’m sure there will be more databases in the future. If a site intends to gather those database into one place and make them easy to search, that sounds good to me. Worth a look.

Sabrina is also Researcher/Author of
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